The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
by EliezerYudkowsky
Summary: Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic. This was supposed to be a bit of utterly deranged fun, but got out of control and ended up as a deep philosophical exploration.
1. Disclaimer and Hazard Warnings

**DISCLAIMER:**

It goes without saying that all characters remain the property of their respective authors, and that I have neither asked nor obtained permission to (ab)use them. Still, I hope that I have done them justice.

**SPOILER ALERTS**:

This work contains humongous spoilers for _A Fire Upon The Deep_ by Vernor Vinge and _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan. If you're ever planning to read those books, then you should stop _now_ and read them _first_. Especially _Permutation City._

All other sources should be relatively sanitized. With the exception of a medium spoiler for _Midnight at the Well of Souls,_ but it's not worth missing the story over that.

**MEMETIC HAZARD WARNINGS**:

Concepts contained in this story may cause SAN Checking in any mind not inherently stable at the third level of stress. Story may cause extreme existential confusion. Story is insane. The author recommends that anyone reading this story sign up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute to have their brain preserved after death for later revival under controlled conditions. Readers not already familiar with this author should be warned that he is not bluffing.

Still here? Then with that said...


	2. Everyone vs The Blight

_in the uncaring city she waits for remittance  
__in loneliness and terrible paucity,__  
for the weight raised up high  
__to fall down and down,  
all the way down,  
fall upon her  
and shatter  
her hated  
reality..._

_* * *_

"The event horizon is within range of our instruments," Pham Nuwen announced, his voice quiet in the crowded control room. "And the corridor is still holding."

Ravna Bergnsdot stared out of the viewscreen, shifting slightly to see over the shoulders of the people in front of her. If she had been foolish enough to trust her eyes - to believe that what was seen, was real - then she would have thought that there was no viewscreen, only a hole in the wall, a door into naked space. But the stars beyond had a depth, a three-dimensionality of representation, that would never have been visible to the parallax of naked eyes. You could have called it a lie - but surely the real lie was the flat bowl of stars you would see with unassisted human vision, eyes claiming that reality was embedded in a finite sphere; the accidental deception with which Nature had tricked the ancient planet-bound, the false shell of night. So their ship rushed forward at some meaningless speed that no meatbound mind could imagine, and it was just barely possible to see the closest stars move. You had to look carefully. There were a _lot_ of stars.

Directly ahead of them was a small but growing black pit - which was the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy - and it was hard to shake the impression that they were very... slowly... falling.

"Well," snapped the young girl with her hair done up in yellow ribbons, "are we _there_ yet?"

Pham Nuwen, or the shattered fragment of Old One embedded in him, could be inhumanly patient at times. "Ten minutes, Haruhi. It's a corridor of the Low Beyond, not the Transcend, and our FTL isn't all that fast here."

Ravna ground her teeth together. Something about that one girl, out of all their bizarre guests, had the ability to set her on edge. Why couldn't they all be like Belldandy? "Be glad it's not thirty thousand years," Ravna bit out. "That's how long it _should_ take to get to the galactic core. Be glad the computers are still working, be glad your _brains_ haven't given out, this far into the Unthinking Depths -"

"Ease up, mate," said a slight and slightly thin man, that absurd rapier still slung over one shoulder. Harold Shea gave her a mild, friendly look. "This may be _your_ home universe, but the rest of us are pretty eager to move on at this point."

_This... IS... your home universe! You are _not_ a cross-dimensional traveler! Your life was a Powers-be-damned _computer simulation!_ Your body was not _transported_ here, it was _synthesized_ into the real world by Old One's nanotechnology, patterned into existence like a living dinner steak, and you're never going anywhere else but here!_

There were times when Ravna thought that Old One had simply been insane.

And there were times when she managed to swallow her naivete and remember the long, long history of the galaxy, and how many times various Powers had done things that only _looked_ insane. Even in the retrospective lens of history, the hidden reasons weren't _always_ apparent afterward. But there was _more_ than enough evidence to suggest that what sometimes looked like stupidity, or even madness, was just the strategy of a very, very, very intelligent mind. How much hubris did it take for a mind running at 10^17 operations-per-second, dealing with a mind of 10^60 ops/second, to presume that what it _could not understand_ was _reasonless?_ Enough hubris that she probably couldn't comprehend it with her own small mind.

No. There was method to Old One's madness, there had to be. From the crashed refugee ship they had gleaned this map to the unreachable, the corridor of navigable space stretching all the way to the central black hole of the galaxy, the singularity which lay at the exact center of the Zones of Thought. If there were a power beyond the Powers - something that laid down the Zones of Thought, something capable of setting barriers to bar even superintelligences - then it might lie at the end of this mysterious corridor. If there was a key to defeating the Blight, it might be here.

And Old One - barred itself from reaching into this place, for the navigable corridor was only of the Beyond, not the Transcend - Old One had somehow anticipated this possibility, before the Blight killed it. And Old One had blessed her and Pham with a company that would, in some way she couldn't begin to imagine, prove well-suited to the task.

Ravna's eyes flickered around the crowded control room.

How the delusion of being a trans-universal traveler was going to help save the galaxy, her own mind could not imagine.

"I'll be glad to leave this bloody Shadow," said one of their guests. Beardless, slim, light-eyed, the man called Merlin. "No offense to our honorable hosts. But I can hardly even change shape here, and I don't like being cut off from the Logrus completely."

There were murmurs of agreement all around the room, from various synthetic beings who remembered magical powers that they were never getting back.

She was _not_ looking forward to the moment when all their guests realized that _this_ universe was their last and final stop. When the momentum of their imaginary travels came to an abrupt and shuddering halt. Synthesized and abandoned - the Powers did not have a reputation for pity on those mortals they found useful.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder; Ravna turned, and found herself looking into the eyes of Jake Stonebender. "You're thinking we're going to be disappointed," Jake said.

Ravna nodded. Jake was one of the nicer guests, a man with empathy (and sympathy) so acute that it bordered on telepathy. It wasn't supernatural, of course, couldn't be, and Jake didn't claim it was. According to Jake, he'd had the memories of being telepathic, for just a single night, with the customers of a bar called Callahan's - and ever since Jake had been trying by sheer niceness and empathy to bring down the borders between himself and other people. Trying to reproduce the event. Which he never would. It was only a synthesized memory.

Jake smiled and shrugged. "We've all been through this before, you know. All of us except you. You're hardly the _first_ universe whose denizens have been convinced that it and it alone was the ultimate bottom level of reality."

A laugh went through the room, nasty in some places and gentle in others. "Hell," said the man called Merlin, "you should have seen the look on my face when I realized that Amber and Chaos _weren't_ the twin poles of all existence, and that Xander here," nodding to a man dressed in brown robes and black boots, wearing a flashlight-like object on his belt, "_wasn't_ from just another Shadow."

"It is a great and special moment," stated the oft-pontificating figure who called himself Lazarus Long, "when we realize the universe is larger than anything we knew about as children; and you, Ravna, are blessed to be heading for your moment."

"Speak for yourself," said one of the three identical-looking fourteen-year-old boys who had clustered in one corner of the room. They'd all had the same name originally, and had apparently come from slightly different versions of the same base simulated universe... along with a single copy of a red-haired girl, dressed in a torn form-fitting red suit, with bandages on her right arm and a patch over her left eye. She'd refused medical help, with prejudice; and a discreet scan had shown that, in fact, she was undamaged underneath the bandages. The red-haired girl was the creepiest of their guests, always staring around her with a expression of utter contempt. The three boys had some sort of messed-up relationship with her, and Ravna didn't know if they were sharing her, or taking turns, or what the hell was going on with the four of them, actually. The three boys wore distinguishing badges marked with the numbers 1000, 4 x 10^4, and +1. The one who had spoken was the third child, nicknamed Oncemore, and Oncemore now spoke once more: "That first moment was _fucking traumatic_ for some of us. Ravna, if you or Pham do have any trouble dealing with reality once it sets in, I'm here for you -"

The red-haired girl snorted in complete disgust.

"- and so are we all," finished the boy.

"Yes," said the beautiful and quiet woman with the blue markings on her face, the goddess Belldandy - even Ravna sometimes found herself thinking of the woman as a "goddess". A smaller and softer deity, such as humans might have conceived to worship, in some more naive era when no one had yet imagined such a thing as a Power. "I remember what a shock it was to find that there were worlds beyond the reach of Yggdrasil." She clung a little tighter to the enviable black-haired boy next to her, who smiled and hugged her back. "If Keiichi hadn't been with me to help me deal with it -"

"_I_ probably would have gone crazy," said the black-haired boy wryly.

"The universe _has_ to bottom out _somewhere!_" Ravna had sworn she wasn't going to get involved in this argument again, and yet she couldn't seem to help herself. "You're going to come to a stop someday - and that place happens to be _here,_ dammit! There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how you got here - or maybe 'reasonable' is too strong a word, but it's a perfectly _logical_ explanation. And that explanation says that _this is it._ You've reached the end of the line."

"Been there," chorused Jake Stonebender and around half the others, "done that."

"_No! _Old One _simulated_ you being there and doing that! It simulated your experiences - it might even have simulated your whole world for all I know - and that's how all those apparently impossible things could happen to you! Old One simulated your base worlds, Old One invented the higher universes and higher metaverses you discovered, Old One crossed them over! And then it finally synthesized you outside the simulation - out here, in the _real_ world! Don't you _understand?_" Ravna stopped, because it was clear from the looks on their faces that they _did_ understand.

"Look, Ravna," Harold Shea said gently. "I understand your perspective. Don't get me wrong. The first time I heard that my whole life had been a computer simulation - well, it was pretty scary. I'd been through enough worlds, at that point, to know that whenever it started to look like something magical actually _had_ a reductionist explanation, the reductionist explanation _was_ usually right. I thought that probably _had_ been the truth all along - the _real_ explanation for how I got from one world to another. I mean, it did seem pretty absurd if I stepped back and thought about it." Shea shrugged. "That's what I thought the _first_ time."

_Aaaagh!_ "Don't you understand that Old One can just simulate _that_ too?"

Shea nodded. "Yes, that's what I thought the _second_ time. It did indeed occur to me, the second time through, that the Solid State Entity could have _just_ as easily synthesized my memory of the Five Galaxies and the Transcendents. But there was this certain nagging doubt, you understand." Shea sighed. "By the third time, it was just one more way of going from one place to another."

Ravna's hands made helpless gestures, as if trying to clutch air. "But we _agree_ on all the real facts of the universe up _until_ this point? You _agree_ that all your memories were simply synthesized, or, at _best_, experienced within Old One's simulation?"

"Or within whatever simulated Old One," Shea said agreeably. "Look at it from _my_ perspective, Ravna. What are the odds that _this particular_ reality was the bottom one?"

Ravna buried her face in her hands. "We agree on all the facts of the universe up to this point. We agree on the reasons why you believe what you believe. Shouldn't we be able to agree on what we predict will happen next?"

Shea shrugged.

"We're always dreaming," said a middle-aged woman who carried herself with a queenly air and a quite peculiar demeanor, "and no matter how many times we wake up, we can wake up another time after that. It's a race whose end can never be reached. And _will_ I be glad to wake up from this one! Ship time, ship time, just shipping shipping shipping from one end of the galaxy to the other! I haven't been so bored in years! Since I followed the rabbit!"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," said a taller and brown-haired boy, standing next to the yellow-ribboned girl - Kyon, that was his name. Kyon wore his customary expression of detached cynicism. "We don't _know_ this is the exit."

"Where _else_ would it be if not here?" snapped the yellow-ribboned girl. "Honestly, Kyon, you can be so _dense_ sometimes!"

"Kyon-san's statement is logical," said Spock.

Pham Nuwen held up a hand. "I'm getting something on our sensors now... analyzing..." Pham's eyes flickered, and Ravna shivered; it might have been her imagination, but for a moment she thought she had caught something incomprehensible staring out of Pham's eyes, a fragment of the fathomless corpse of Old One.

Suddenly the ship fell out of FTL; and in the same instant, Ravna felt a pressure that quickly ramped up to a fifth of a G, making her body seem suddenly heavier, and the floor tilted; they were accelerating in real space now.

"_Got it!_" Pham said suddenly. "There's an artificial object ahead of us, just above the event horizon of the galactic singularity. Smaller than I would have expected - just a few hundred meters in diameter - and made out of some material that I can only describe as... anomalous-sensor-profile-onium..."

"I don't suppose it happens to block forty percent of neutrinos?" murmured a tall man with a shaved head. Pham shrugged in his general direction.

"How about the Blighted buggers pursuing us?" asked a semi-unshaven man; he was wearing shoddily mismatched chain mail, and more importantly, to him at least, a badge. "How long 've we got before we get stomped flatter than a... very flat thing?"

"Half an hour at the outside, Vimes," Pham replied. "Whatever we're going to do there -"

"_We have to do it very fast!_" finished the extremely short man in the gray uniform. "Um..." Miles Vorkosigan looked around the room. "I know a lot of us have a problem with shutting up and getting out of the way - including me - but those of us who aren't computer specialists really _do_ need to shut up and get out of the way. This universe seems like Spock and Belldandy territory."

"But -" began the boy with the scar on his forehead.

"Sorry, no buts!" said the man in the bloodstained sweater. The man's word seemed to settle the issue; there were reluctant nods from around the room. The kindly, gentle old man was the closest that the group seemed to have to an acknowledged leader - or maybe arbiter would be a better term. (Though for some reason he refused to clean the blood off his sweater, which didn't fit with his image at all.)

The apparent tilt of the deck reversed itself; they were slowing down, now, but still drawing closer to the anomalonium object. In the viewscreen it resolved into a cup-like shape, a hollow teardrop with an opening at the top and a tapering tail coming down.

"I dub thee Another Damned Holy Grail," said the girl with the red shirt and black miniskirt and thigh-high black stockings (it made for an amazingly striking ensemble). Miles, heroically, tried to shush his girlfriend; but Tohsaka Rin gave him a hard elbow to the ribs, making his breath audibly whoosh out.

"Nothing promising on the tail," Pham Nuwen said, his voice flat and concentrated. "I'm taking us into the opening -"

And in almost the same moment, they were inside the teardrop and halted, facing the bottom of the cup, where, a hundred meters away, there was the gleam of complexity, a distant tracery within the cup's surface/floor.

Pham stood up abruptly from his chair, almost bumping into one of the other bodies in the overcrowded control room. "Suit up," he said. "We're going out there."

They shuffled into the cargo bay (the ordinary airlock wouldn't have been nearly large enough) and pulled on their pressure suits in silence, the guests stretching on the light spacesuits with varying degrees of recent or accustomed skill.

"I hate space," murmured the man with the shock of yellow hair, who always wore a yellow trenchcoat and always seemed to be complaining about something. "It's enough to make me wish I was visiting Hell instead. Seems like every bloody time I almost die out here -" He was interrupted by a muffled sound from a boy completely wrapped in an orange winter coat. "Yah, I suppose I shouldn't complain about almost."

They left the ship in a flock of strangeness, a horde of not overwhelmingly coordinated silver suits, tagged in Ravna's hud with the bizarre labels that served them as names. Belgarath, who the crowd seemed to look on as a relative newcomer, was the only one who had trouble - his thrusters vectoring him off in a random direction - but a suit labeled "Silverlock" caught up with him before he hit anything.

And so in a handful of seconds, they were standing in front of -

If life had been more convenient, they would have been standing in front of an airlock, with human-breathable air on the other side, and understandable directions on _this_ side.

What lay at the base of the cup instead was a fractal tracery of raised substance and depressions, like symbols inside symbols...

"It's almost like the Logrus..." murmured one of the spacesuits, the one labeled Merlin in her hud. A few other suits turned their head toward him. "But not the same thing at all, I'm afraid." The heads turned back.

Spock, Belldandy, the Doctor, and Pham Nuwen were arranging themselves around the tracery.

"Everyone," said Ravna out loud, her voice transmitted by radio among the suits. "I do think you should look at the symbols and watch what Pham and the others are doing. If you have any ideas, please speak up. There has to be some reason why Old One wanted _all_ of you here."

Secrets hidden in their imaginary memories? Toolboxes within their synthetic skills? If she'd shepherded all these lunatics to the center of the galaxy for _nothing_ -

They stared at the surface pattern for a while.

"I think," ventured Daniel Jackson from the mob of floating suits, "that the depressions are meant to be traced by the equivalent of a finger - it seems similar to some of the other alien artifacts I've examined, where it turned out in the end that they were meant to be traced - or pushed around, in one case -"

"Yes..." came a mutter - Ravna's hud localized the sound to the Doctor's suit, though the tone was distinctive enough. "Yes... Exxilon... the City... the puzzle on the wall... it does seem similar."

"The thought had occurred to me," came the regulated tones from Spock's suit, "but I thought to study the machinery further before proceeding. Visualize a Rubik's cube where you may not be able to reverse a move. If it begins in an almost-unscrambled state, the first moves are critical -"

"Time's wasting, eyebrow boy!" Vimes said in a hard tone. "We have enemies, remember."

"This wasn't built by something with fingers," Ravna said. "This came from..." her voice trailed off on the sheer impossibility of explanation. Powers beyond the Powers. The makers of the Zones of Thought, barriers which not even Old One, not even the Blight could alter, with all their picotechnology. "Something so far beyond the need for fingers we can't even imagine it -"

"- which built this for a species _with_ fingers!" Miles interrupted. "They _meant_ it to be used, or they wouldn't give it controls at all. It would've just shot us down as we approached. And the corridor was Low Beyond, so it's meant to be used by _us,_ not your Transcendents - and that means they meant it to be _understood_ by our tiny little minds."

"So does that mean," said Haruhi, "that it probably won't do anything disastrous if we just try pressing a few buttons already?"

"**NO**," said the Doctor, Belgarath, and half a dozen others of the older and wiser sort.

"I've seen this..." came a whisper from the silver suit containing the tall man, in the dark robes, with a shock of black hair, with solid black eyes whose pupils shined like stars in the night. "Through ten thousand million billion dreams have I walked and watched -"

"Get on with it!" came the inevitable cry (from a strange man who never seemed to say anything else).

"- and I have seen this... _from another angle_..."

Spock and Pham Nuwen glanced at each other, and then, wordlessly, began to rotate themselves, using their thrusters to shift above and around the traceries.

Then - "Fascinating," came Spock's voice. "It is a map of the galaxy." Followed a moment later by Pham Nuwen's "Not just the galaxy! The _Zones!_"

Ravna blinked. The figure... might have had some vaguely spiral or oval qualities, but it looked nothing like the galaxy to her.

Pham Nuwen was still speaking. "The raised metal ridges show the _density contours_ of the star map - gradients of starlight or star mass, I'm not sure which - and the _depressions_ show the contours of the Zones of Thought. We divide them into Unthinking Depths, Slow Zone, Beyond, and Transcend, but there are many subtler gradients than that..."

An absolutely unbelievable thought came to Ravna. If she'd thought slightly faster, she might have shut up about it - if only she'd thought just a little faster -

"And you think the depressions are supposed to be _moved?_ With our _fingers?_"

It should have produced absolute silence. Throughout the mob of suits. It should have stunned the whole _galaxy._ _Everything_ should have gone quiet at that. The idea that you could rearrange the Zones of Thought just by pushing a depression with your fingers -

"Ah," said one of the three fourteen-year-old boys, the one called Thousand_,_ a private being full of wry malice and manipulation. "And the invading alien horror _du jour_, the Blight as you call it, can't survive in the Slow Zone. Right? The Blight can invade systems in the Beyond with computer viruses and mind control, but in the Slow Zone it's essentially dead. So we just push up the Slow Zone and kill it. Like expanding an AT field."

Ravna literally could not speak. The idea was too huge to be comprehended. Too awful. Whole civilizations built on FTL travel and nanotechnology and advanced automation would be reduced to utter barbarism. Trillions upon uncounted trillions would die in the collapse -

"Yes," came the soft voice of Pham Nuwen. "Old One says that's what we have to do."

"_No!_" Ravna screamed. Heedless of everything else she vectored her thrusters at maximum -

Only to find her suit failing to respond. Pham had cut off her control.

"I'm sorry, Ravna," said Pham's voice. There was human sadness in it, and something more alien, something crystalline and god-touched. "They'll _all_ die otherwise. The Blight will kill them - or worse. This way, some will live. We have no other choices, Ravna." He was carefully scrutinizing the surface pattern. "If it makes you feel any better - Old One thinks our corridor is going to disappear during the convulsion. It may reappear afterward, but we'll be in the Unthinking Depths long enough to kill all of us."

"Hey!" came an annoyed voice from Haruhi. "You cut off my suit power!"

"Of course he did," came the Thousand's voice. "Our new friend Pham is afraid one of us will _interfere_ with his saving the galaxy and killing the lot of us." Elaborate sarcasm entered his voice. "It is, of course, an entirely unfounded worry."

"But still a clever precaution," came the gruff approval of Vimes.

"There surely was a time when I would have tried to interfere," came Belldandy's voice. There was a terrible abiding sorrow in it, a song of bleak experience, some unwanted bitter adulthood that had been forced on her in her journeys. "Do what you must to save your galaxy, Pham Nuwen; and try to live on, afterward."

Pham was already examining the depressions. His fingers hovered over, sketching movements - it looked like he was plotting angles to kill the Blight with a single slide, digging in his fingers and moving with the momentum of his suit behind them, just in case the controls updated the galaxy in realtime. "There won't be an afterward," Pham said absently. "We're going to die here."

"I wish," said Nathan Brazil and the Nameless One, speaking in almost perfect unison.

"You will learn," came the voice of Prince Adam, who always spoke in simple words as if addressing an audience of six-year-olds, "that any big magic explosion which is supposed to kill you, always sends you somewhere else instead."

There was the muffled sound of the boy in the orange coat; Ravna thought she caught the words "die", "episode", and "anthropic".

One of the other suits made a brief motion through the air, a puff of thrust and counterthrust. Pham's head swiveled in shocked surprise, but the suit made no move to approach the controls of the galaxy. "And don't think," said the voice of that suit - that was the fourteen-year-old boy marked 4 x 10^4 - "that you're doing this without our consent, or that you took us by surprise with your computer virus. _I too_ accept responsibility for what you do this day. _Believe me_, I have the power to prevent it!"

Several of the other suits bobbed in agreement and demonstration.

Ravna's paralyzed thoughts managed to make a single further inference: Old One had foreseen this possible end - or something like it - and arranged for its synthetic creatures to remember surviving catastrophe, over and over, so that they would not hesitate to put themselves in harm's way.

She should have been afraid for herself, for her impending death, but she honestly wasn't, she was so afraid for the galaxy instead.

Pham Nuwen took a deep breath, positioned himself with a few thrusts over the map of the galaxy, his fingers poised to slide -

And Ravna suddenly realized that she _was_ afraid to die, she was terribly afraid, her existence was about to end in the next few seconds, no more thoughts ever ever no more Ravna - "_Pham! Don't! Please wait!"_

Just a few more seconds, a few more seconds to come to grips with the end of her life, that was all she wanted.

Pham's rockets puffed thrust -

And Ravna's last scream choked off abruptly.


	3. The Finale of the Crossover

They were lying in a heap on the ground, her and everyone, lying on small green plants in one gravity, with the sky bright blue above them; Ravna felt a sudden but brief pressure on her skin, as the suit adjusted to the sudden presence of air pressure. They were lying next to a fountain courtyard, an open space in a city with skyscrapers spotted here and there. A steady stream of passersby dressed in casual clothes wandered in both directions through the surrounding sidewalks, seeming to pay no attention to each other or to the sudden invasion of silver suits.

_What... what..._

_"WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCCCKK!_"

There was muffled applause, as the others tried to clap through their spacesuits. Some of them were already pulling off their helmets and breathing deeply of the air. (Could anyone _possibly_ be that stupid?)

Ravna scrambled to her feet, breathing rapidly into her helmet. "The, the device, it, it must have transported us, when we tried to activate it -"

"To green grass, blue skies, and one G?" said the little man in the gray uniform. He'd looked at the others and then begun to skin off his own pressure suit.

_Powers beyond the Powers._ "It could have analyzed our biology - in an _instant_ - teleportation isn't possible even in the Transcend, but the makers of _that_ artifact had technology beyond transcendence -"

"Possible," conceded Miles. "But in that case I don't think our, ah, less reductionist compatriots would have taken off their helmets. You did _know_ it was safe?" He sent an inquiring glance in the direction of the ones who'd been first to de-suit.

"Oh, yes," Merlin said. "We are _back in town_ and _open for business._" Ravna blinked; for a moment she'd thought she'd seen a writhing spiral in front of the man... no, there was nothing there, her eyes were just tired.

"I can't contact the main System," Belldandy said, "but I'm online."

"I don't suppose _this _time -" Kyon murmured to Haruhi.

"How would I know?" Haruhi snapped back. "I didn't know the first time."

"Master?" said Belgarath, holding in his hand the silver amulet that he always wore. For a moment Ravna thought she heard a rushing sound, though it could have just been the waters of the nearby fountain. Then Belgarath lowered his hand and sighed. "Didn't think so."

"What - are you all - saying?" A completely insane thought had entered Ravna's mind, maybe from the dark realms where dwelt the forces of peer pressure; it made no sense at all in the real world. _They... think they... they..._

The man in the bloodstained sweater pointed at the beautiful woman with the blue dots on her forehead. "Belldandy?" he said in that kindly tone. "You're probably as unalarming as it gets."

The woman smiled and lifted her hands, golden bracelets glowing in the sunlight pouring down from above; and _sang,_ wordless beautiful notes in no melody Ravna had ever heard, a simple melody that seemed to pull Ravna out of her shock, out of herself, lift her upward.

And a bright-winged angel came out of the woman's back, and sang with her, the two voices melding in perfect harmony. A glow started around them -

"_AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!_" shrieked Ravna, and scrambled back without thinking until she slammed into the fountain at the center of the courtyard, her momentum sending her right over the ledge and into the water.

There was more scattered clapping.

"Allow me," said the young man who always wore dark, stylish sunglasses. He gave her a hand, and Ravna pulled herself up, still dazed. At least she wasn't wet, under the spacesuit.

"Welcome... to the _real_ world," said the sunglasses-wearer. "For, may I add, the eighteenth fucking time."

That brought on a sudden chorus of exclamations. "Thirty!" "Twenty-three!" "Seventeen is the mystical number!" "Number forty-two! Maybe _this_ time I'll learn the Question!" "Tvelve! Tvelve vorlds! A-ha-ha!"

"Three hundred and _nine,_" said Harold Shea, with a certain amount of pride.

"Four," said Belgarath sheepishly, and received some good-natured catcalls.

And at the end of the recitals, the woman of peculiar airs and queenly dignity who'd spoken before of following rabbits, said: "One thousand, four hundred, and fifty-eight."

That got applause as well.

Ravna's breathing was accelerating out of control. Desperately her mind clung to the shreds of rational explanation. "The - power beyond the Powers - must have scanned us as we were teleported - discovered what magic you _expected_ to be able to use - and gave you that magic, just like it gave us water and air..." Ravna's voice trailed off.

Several of the others were giving her pitying looks. Harold Shea tapped his cheek thoughtfully. "It's _possible_, I suppose. We'll find out what's behind _this_ world eventually." He shrugged.

The truth slammed into Ravna like a weight falling from a great height. You _could_ simulate the appearance of magic with sufficiently advanced nanotechnology - interface it with the brain of people who thought they were casting spells, even - but it would be a _lot _easier - to just -

_I have been uploaded._

_I am running as a computer program, right now, on a death cube inside a Power somewhere, simulating the existence of Ravna Bergnsdot._

"Miss Bergnsdot," said Spock, "you should logically consider that we have made a successful prediction and you have not."

Ravna felt her sanity beginning to crack. Once it was already a given that you were an upload, that you were running as a computer simulation under someone else's control, then _everything_ was suspect, the controller could be tampering with your memories, could have synthesized everything you remembered learning and everything you remembered thinking about, could have composed flawed versions of all the logic and philosophy you'd learned as a child. It could make you believe false mathematical theorems, execute arbitrary inferences, or steer your thoughts away from any realization it didn't like -

"Pham," she whispered.

Maybe Pham could handle this. Maybe Pham, containing the shattered remnants of Old One, could corrupt the simulation, get them - out of here -

If the whole godshatter business hadn't been just a dream.

If the entire effort to save the galaxy hadn't been just a dream.

With a sudden collapse of suspended disbelief, the overwhelming improbability of her own life drove into Ravna's mind like a brick in the solar plexus.

_What are the odds that there ever really was a Ravna Bergnsdot?_

"_Pham!_" she screamed. "_Help me!_"

No one answered.

And then, with sudden realization, Ravna and all the others looked toward a single silver suit that was still lying on the ground.

"_Shit!_" cried Jake Stonebender. There was a sudden rush toward the prone figure that ended with Belldandy yanking off the helmet to show Pham's slack and deadly pale face.

"He's not breathing!" yelled Jake. "There's some kind of transfer incompatibility! Neo, we need cardiopulmonary support over here!"

The sunglassed figure made no move that Ravna could see, but the body's chest began to inflate and deflate.

There was a slow, dreadful pause, as Belldandy looked down at Pham's face expectantly. "Pham?" she said. "Come back to us?"

Nothing happened.

Spock pushed his way through the crowd, looked up at Belldandy as if for permission. She nodded.

Spock knelt and laid a hand on Pham's forehead, fingers spreading to touch the temples.

"What -" Ravna started to say, and the man with a lock of white hair clapped a hand over her mouth.

After a period Spock pulled his fingers away, looking grimly at the breathing but speechless corpse. "Part of his mind is missing," said the dry Vulcan voice. "As though it were simply deleted. I detect no trace of Old One in him; I suspect that is what was removed."

Belgarath raised a hand. "I can heal him with the Will and the Word -"

The Doctor yanked the hand down. "You'll do _nothing!_" shouted the man with the scarf. "Haven't you listened to anything the rest of us have told you? Your magic is almost pure wish-fulfillment and there's no telling what _implements_ your wishes _here!_ You want to invoke some unknown genie to fill in the missing details of Pham Nuwen's _mind?_" The Doctor shook a fist in Belgarath's face. "Stay out of this! This is a job for magic-users and psychics who do their own detail work!"

Spock and Belldandy crossed gazes, and nodded to each other. With slow ceremony, Belldandy reached out her right hand, and Spock his own left; and they clasped their fingers, above Pham's slowly breathing body.

Spock put his other hand on Pham's forehead.

And Belldandy, softly, softly, began to sing.

"It'll be all right," Miles whispered in Ravna's ear.

Ravna didn't dare even move. The fear for Pham, and the transcendent beauty of the glow that was beginning around Belldandy, somehow drove through all disbelief and absurdity, making her hold her breath. The goddess's angel came forth, its wings spreading wide, seeming to embrace Spock, who knelt even lower over the body. A whirl of unrecognizable symbols spun out from Belldandy's angel, glowing letters in the air to circle them; and Spock's face tensed.

Miles continued his whisper. "I was in bad shape after my own first jump - lost some medical equipment that was helping to keep me alive - might even have died, if Dorothy hadn't gotten me to Glinda in time. But we've got plenty of healers, here -"

Pham drew in a great, ragged breath, and started coughing.

Ravna let out her own breath, and staggered with sudden dizziness, gasping for oxygen. Then with despairing stupidity she ripped off her own helmet: If the world was mad, and it _was_ mad, then let it be mad.

The air was bright, and fresh, and smelled like cut plants and daylight.

"What happened?" whispered Pham. "Ravna...?" His voice grew panicked. "_Old One?_"

Somehow the man who only said 'Get on with it!' had managed to end up at the front of the huddle. "And now for something... completely different!" he said. "It's -"

"You're fine," said the man in the bloodstained sweater, and though the words were spoken in an ordinary human voice, there was something in it like the song of Belldandy. "You're just fine, and you're going to be just fine. It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood."

Pham wobbled to his feet, pushing aside a dozen proffered hands. "Where..." he said dazed. "Where is this?"

"_Good question_," chorused the voices. The mass of faces turned outward, looking expectantly at the city skyline, the roads and skyscrapers and ever-hurrying pedestrians.

"Would anyone like to _answer_ the question?" called the man with the white streak in his hair. "_Hello?_"

The pedestrians walked onward. Their eyes did not turn or flicker, their faces remained expressionless.

Then Spock pointed wordlessly, and all the faces turned toward a single woman, who was watching them from elsewhere in the park.

Middle-aged, the woman looked; a shockingly average sort of appearance. By the standards of Ravna's people, it was the sort of flaw you would fix. She was dressed in an archaic sort of style, like someone had actually _machined_ her clothes out of _threads_; and her face wasn't quite human-colored - no, it _was_, but it was painted with some kind of almost-but-not-quite-flesh-toned colorant.

The middle-aged woman stood there, and watched them all, with her mouth open.

"I..." she said, in a catching, awkward voice. "I... haven't... to real people... in a while..." Her hand began to reach out to them -

Then the woman broke, and fell to her knees, sobbing.

"Who is _she?_" whispered Ravna. Well, she'd meant it to be a whisper. It came out rather too loud.

Nathan Brazil and Haruhi Suzumiya exchanged glances, nodded confirmation at each other, and then said in unison, "God."

"You can tell _that_ quickly?" rumbled the mass of scar tissue who called himself the Nameless One.

Brazil and Haruhi shrugged, as if to say that it might take one to know one but they were damned if they knew _how_.

Jake Stonebender, after trading glances with some of the others, pushed his way to the forefront of the crowd. "Hey," said Jake softly. "You want to talk about it?"

The kneeling woman choked, even through her own tears. "I - I - talk -" She gasped for breath, looked up at them. "I haven't had anyone to talk to - in so long, in so long - there was a man who was supposed to stay with me, but it ended up that I didn't like him, and I told him I hated him, but he had only stayed alive for me in the first place, so he ended himself after that, and then there was no one to talk to - no one, no one -" The words spilling out of her like water from a broken dam. "Trapped here, I wasn't supposed to be trapped here, I was supposed to go with the others but I stayed to help Durham and they left without me and then it was too late - nothing, nothing, no one, no one, I could have made fake people to talk to, but I didn't dare, if I'd pulled into my own dreams it would have been the end of me, if I'd changed myself to be happy it would have been the end of me, I didn't dare create life it went so badly the last time -"

Of all people, it was the red-haired girl in the torn red suit, with the bandaged arm and bandaged eye, who pushed the crowd aside like other people didn't exist, and sat down next to the crying woman. The usual expression of absolute contempt was gone from the girl's face. "Hey," the red-haired girl said softly. Her unbandaged arm went around the other. "It'll be all right now. I promise. Trust me. I've been there."

The sobbing woman looked up at that. Incredulity flickered on her face. "You've _been there?_"

The red-haired girl nodded. "Pretty much, it sounds like. Someday I'll tell you about the Third Impact, and what happened to me after that." She directed a cold glance in the direction of the three identical fourteen-year-old boys, then her face relaxed again. "But that's not important right now. My name is Asuka Langley Soryu."

"I'm Maria," said the woman, "Maria Deluca. I used to be an Autoverse enthusiast, and -" she half-laughed, half-hiccuped - "yes, I suppose I'm God now that Paul Durham's gone. I'm - I'm sorry about all this - about bringing you here - but I was so desperate - it was a crazy idea but it seemed like the only thing worth trying -"

"_YOU brought us here? YOU? YOU'RE the power beyond the Powers?_"

The Nameless One folded a huge, scarred hand over Pham's mouth. "Excuse him," the hulk of muscles rumbled. "It's his first time."

Harold Shea bowed politely. "Forgive me, Maria," he said, "and it's all right if you don't want to talk about it right away; but we usually _are_ pretty interested in knowing how we came to a place, and what the rules are."

Jake threw Shea a quelling glance. "Tell your story at your own pace, Maria. I'd offer you a drink and a fireplace, but, well, you're the God here, not me."

And they listened.

And Maria told them her story.

"Excuse me," Ravna said at one point. She was careful to make her voice soft and polite, this time. "I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, but I'm afraid I don't understand. How can you run a computer program without a computer?"

"It was Paul Durham's theory, not mine," Maria said. "Durham thought... I don't really understand what he thought, and he was pretty surprised at what happened later, so he was probably wrong anyway. But Durham thought that if you simulated a computer program with conscious observers inside it, you could stop the _simulator,_ but the _program_ would continue. It would continue within the... dust, he called it."

"What is dust, how does it work, and why would it notice you simulating a computer program with conscious observers inside and then carry on the program?" asked Harold Shea.

Ravna nodded. You had to admit it was the obvious next question.

Maria shook her head. "There were other things that happened later - let me continue the story -"

At first it seemed like Durham's theory had worked, Maria said. Ravna stifled a growing sense of disbelief as Maria spoke of the great civilization Elysium, that had grown out of a cellular automaton that had run for a few minutes of computer time on a supercomputer network. Ravna had thought at first that Durham's theory sounded like a scam - there was no possible way to test it by experiment, since you could never _see_ the computer program continuing in the dust - but Maria had woken up _inside_ a mature Elysian civilization, the distant outgrowth of that initial cellular automaton which had included a scan of her brain. Which Ravna had to admit sounded like a fair experimental observation, no matter how incomprehensible.

But then -

"_What?_" said Pham Nuwen. Even some of the meta-universal travelers were looking confused. "Your world got destroyed _how?_"

Maria tried again to explain: Elysium had simulated _another_ cellular automaton _within_ their own universe - using a significant part of the computing resources of their whole civilization to model an alien solar system down to the cells of its physics. It had been an effort to create aliens, real aliens, not patchwork constructs but creatures with a genuine biology and genuine evolutionary history.

"We _thought_ we were simulating them," Maria said. "But when we tried to order the simulation to _change_ the Autoverse - to make a cell change state to something _other_ than what it should have been under the Autoverse rules - when we tried to exert our power as gods, the computer programs disobeyed."

Even Spock blinked at that.

"Which meant," Maria continued, "that the cellular automaton rules of _Elysium_ had been disobeyed - breaking the laws of physics supposed to govern our own computers - in order to preserve the cellular automaton physics of the _Autoverse._ Now, we were still controlling the _edges_ of the gigantic cellular automaton. Sending in ambient light and so on, but there was nothing really out there, it was all arbitrary, there was no deeper physics behind it. So we found that we could still change the Autoverse around the edges. And we used that to try to communicate with the Lambertians - the Autoverse inhabitants - and then -" Maria stopped, looking confused. "I don't really understand what happened then. The Lambertians rejected the theory that we were their creators, and then Elysium started to disintegrate, the laws of physics failing, spreading out from the computers that ran the Autoverse."

"Your whole _universe_ is dead?" said Jake Stonebender softly, almost disbelievingly.

Some of the other travelers had tears in their eyes, or looks on their faces of unbearable memory.

"Not - not exactly," Maria said. "The Elysians used their remaining computers to pack themselves into a new, different cellular automaton, and ran it for a short time - long enough for it to be consciously observed from the inside - and then halted it. I mean _we_ halted the simulation, on the outside. The Elysians thought they would continue on within the dust. It was just like what Paul Durham did to originally launch the Elysium universe. I hope it worked."

Jake nodded; the other travelers bowed their heads, and some whispered prayers to gods long left behind.

"But Durham and I stayed behind, you see, to make sure the Elysians were properly launched, and then Durham and I launched ourselves - it worked _that_ time, too, at least for us - only Durham didn't really want to stay alive at that point, he'd lived for eight thousand years and was sick of jumping between worlds, but he didn't want _me_ to be alone. So he stayed with me - he just modified _what he wanted_ - but I found after a while that I really couldn't stand him, I never could, so I told him I didn't want to see him any more and then Durham switched himself off and there was no one in that whole universe but me -" and Maria started to cry again.

Ravna blinked, trying to take it all in.

_But how did _we_ get here?_

Even she could see that it wasn't the right time to press on the poor girl - especially since Maria, apparently, was God, and could destroy them all with a thought.

But she _really wanted to know,_ damn it.

"So I thought," Maria said, getting hold of herself. "I thought about what had happened. The original theory - Durham's theory - it didn't really account for what had happened with the Autoverse."

"It actually does sound more like magic than physics," said Harold Shea, with a serious look on his face. "I've been through enough worlds to know the difference - why, back in my early days, I used to travel around between worlds by describing the rules used to think about them! The Laws of Similarity and Contagion, that sort of thing. Eventually I worked out the laws of thought which described that whole multiverse, which is how I got out... but _our_ stories can wait until later. Anyway, Maria, the logic of the events you're describing is one where consciousness has effects that take precedence over the laws of physics - where lower levels of organization give way to higher levels of organization. There are universes where the visible rules are simple, mathematical, and fundamental, and everything that happens, happens within them. And there are universes where the visible rules are complicated and have explicit special cases for surface phenomena - and usually some of the visible rules are about mental phenomena, and don't visibly reduce to rules about non-mental parts. We call the former sort of universe 'natural', and the latter sort 'magical'. By our conventions, Maria, you would be considered to come from a magical universe - or magical multiverse, rather, since you've already moved around inside it and discovered some of the rules for traveling."

Maria blinked at that. "You thought that through very quickly."

Shea shrugged, a graceful demurral. "I've been doing this for quite a while."

Maria nodded. "That's right," she said, almost whispering to herself, "that's how it was supposed to work..."

The woman drew in a breath. "So I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. I reached some of the same conclusions... as..."

"Harold Shea," Shea identified himself.

"As Harold Shea. That's when I understood that what had happened was _impossible_ - when I understood that it was, literally, magic. But I _still_ think it's impossible. Magic can't exist. Not _really_ exist."

There was some laughter from the travelers. "I personally assure you that it does," said Merlin, and Belldandy and many of the others nodded.

"I've read a lot of philosophy since then," Maria said. "Minds are too big to be atoms. Mental phenomena _have_ to be made of parts. You _can't_ have things that are _fundamentally complicated._ _Anywhere._ Not in _any_ universe. And I think Durham was wrong too. You can't have a computer program without a computer."

"Then how do you explain what happened with Elysium?" asked Shea. (Many of the other travelers had a _meh, don't care, it's just magic_ look on their faces.) "I mean, you _saw_ that what Durham tried _did_ work. A computer program was run on Earth. The computers running it halted on Earth. And you woke up inside that program after it had grown too large to fit on any computer running within your home universe's laws of physics."

"Well..." Maria said. She drew a deep breath. "Here's what I think. Right now you're all running as computer programs in my universe -"

Ravna's stomach lurched.

" - so suppose I were to make your processors triply redundant? Compute it three different times and compare the outputs? It's not really necessary, the computers of this universe are error-free. But I could make you run as one copy, or three copies, or four copies, duplicating all the inputs, and all the outputs would always be the same. _You_ wouldn't notice how many redundant processors you were running on. Making you run as more or fewer copies wouldn't _feel_ like anything, from the inside. So if you were running on three copies, and I deleted one of the copies, I wouldn't be _killing_ you. You wouldn't even _notice_."

"You mean the _survivors_ wouldn't notice," said Shea. "How would you _know_ if you were killing some of our copies? What if there _was_ someone who was murdered, who ceased to exist when you deleted the copy, who didn't notice anything because they were dead?"

Maria leaned forward, beginning to look intense. "I could _merge_ two copies. I could compare the two programs, bit by bit, and write down the next bit only if the two bits were the same - which they always would be. So that each bit of each copy would have _caused_ that bit of the successor, just as much as a state causes a successor state in an ordinary computer program. Two copies, then one copy, but neither copy would have _died._ Both copies would continue on as the same future copy. Do you see?"

Shea hmmed. "Interesting argument. But maybe you can _merge_ two minds without them noticing so long as they're already identical, and yet _merging_ is still a different operation from _deletion_."

Maria laughed, somewhat ironically. "Durham used to go on about this sort of thing... and it's painful to think that now I'm doing it too... but I still think you're wrong, Mr. Shea. The merge operation doesn't _change_ anything - so why bother merging _bit by bit?_ Why not just compare the two copies, and delete one if they're the same? And then, if you already know the two copies are identical, why not just delete one _without_ checking?"

Shea smiled and shrugged. "Maybe it just works different ways in different universes. If there's one thing I've learned, Miss, it's that things change from one place to another."

Maria shook her head, almost panicky. "No! _That_ I can't believe. The laws governing _that_ - they _have_ to be basic." She drew a breath. "But the point is - there was a computer program describing the very beginning of Elysium, and that computer program _started_ running on Earth. But suppose there was _another_ copy, running somewhere _else,_ that _didn't_ halt."

"_Where?_" asked Ravna.

"Anywhere," Maria said simply. "Then when the program on _Earth_ halted - Durham, _inside_ Elysium, wouldn't notice anything. His universe's software would just be running on one less redundant processor."

Ravna blinked. "But why would anyone from... elsewhere... spend resources on running _that particular_ computer program? How would they _get_ that particular computer program?"

"Because they were running all possible computer programs in order."

Pham Nuwen had said it, not Maria or Shea.

Ravna's mouth gaped open. She felt like someone had kicked her in the head, or kicked her in the brain inside her head, like the whole universe had lurched to the left. "Tha-tha-that's so far beyond the Powers it's not even funny -"

Pham shrugged. "Old One is gone inside my head, but I still remember the thoughts I had for myself about it sort of. I think Old One actually _did_ try simulating all possible computer programs - though only up to ninety bits or so, and only for a couple of quintillion clock ticks each. Out of its equivalent of idle curiosity, mostly. If Old One had infinite resources I'm pretty sure it would have done the whole set."

"That is a logical motivation for a Power," said Spock. "But it does not explain Maria's story of the Autoverse catastrophe. The Elysium program should simply have continued running under its own logic."

"Right!" said Maria. "But if you're trying to compute all possible programs, you have to compute them in some _particular order._ If you just spend a clock tick on the first program, then a clock tick on the second program, then a clock tick on the third program, no program ever gets past one clock tick. So you give the first program a tick; then you give the first and second programs a tick; then you give the first and second and third programs a tick - you see? So computer programs are getting more time the closer they are to the start of the order. And the more time a computer program gets, the more... _likely_ it becomes, somehow, the more likely you are to find yourself in it."

Harold Shea was scribbling something on a sheet of paper he'd pulled from his belt, using a quill pen. "Don't mind me," Shea said absently, "I'm just writing down all the assumptions here, in case someday I have to find this multiverse the old-fashioned way."

"So simpler programs are more likely. But how does _that_ explain the Autoverse catastrophe?" said Pham. "Wouldn't that be a _more_ complicated program?"

Some of the travelers (the ones who had recited higher numbers, or the ones who claimed to have started out as gods or scientific geniuses) snapped their fingers then, and said things like "Ah!" and "I see."

"The physics of Earth - of my birth universe - were _genuinely_ simple," said Maria. "It was a universe that you'd find close to the start of the order. Durham's _starting_ program for Elysium was huge, billions of gigabytes of initial conditions. Now _that_ program might get some time just because you were running all possible programs in order - but some minds, some simulators, might get it by looking through a simpler universe, Earth's universe. By running programs that they _found_ by _simulating_ Earth's universe. _They_ would be where Durham's Elysium got most of its computer time - not from simulators running all possible programs in order."

"But why would anyone go around running complicated computer programs that they found in simulated simple universes?" Ravna said.

Maria shrugged. "_Most_ simulators probably wouldn't. It's just that if _some_ of them do, even a few, then Durham's Elysium was getting most of its computing time from _them_. And the ones who devoted _more_ time to Durham's Elysium would be the ones who were _particularly_ interested in... cellular automata containing conscious observers. You see? When you look at it from that perspective, the Autoverse catastrophe - it wasn't _predictable,_ but in retrospect, it's not _too_ unlikely. The simulator running that copy of Elysium was the sort of simulator who looked through computer programs to find the conscious automata they contained, and singled them out as a special case."

Maria leaned back and looked tired, her story nearing its end. "Nothing like that could have happened in the original Earth, the one that really _was_ running on simple physics. Because that universe really was simple enough to get most of its probability, its reality, from sources like all possible computations running in order. So you would be extremely likely to find the simple version of the computation continuing. But after the initial steps of the Elysium cellular automaton - after the original program on Earth shut off - then Elysium wasn't getting support _from Earth_ any more. It was outside the mainstream of all possible programs being run in order, and into the pool of... special interest simulators? You wouldn't notice the difference from _inside_, at first, but Durham continued into an Elysium that was getting support mostly from simulators who were specifically interested in conscious programs running inside simulated cellular automata. From that standpoint - the Autoverse catastrophe wasn't _inevitable,_ but it was the sort of thing that might happen easily enough - to a substantial fraction of your probability density, I mean... Did everybody follow that?"

Around two-thirds of the travelers raised their hands. Ravna wasn't one of them. Pham was. Miles Vorkosigan was making a maybe-gesture, Belldandy seemed skeptical but sympathetic, Spock had an eyebrow raised, the rabbit-following woman still looked bored, and Belgarath was looking completely lost and muttering about how much he missed the days when he only needed to decode prophecies found among the ravings of the insane.

"And just for the record," said the Doctor, "how did _we_ get here? I think I can guess, but -"

"Well..." Maria said. Guilt flashed across her face. "I'm sorry," she said in a small voice. "I just... I just wanted out of here. I was so alone. I didn't want to evolve new life from scratch. I'd felt bad enough about it the first time, when I realized that they'd made the Autoverse real, and let conscious beings be born and suffer and die inside it. I mean, I probably didn't really make it that much _worse_ - the Autoverse was simple, it probably got most of its probability support from much simpler programs than ours, it would have been just as real anyway... But the Autoverse inhabitants were _aliens_. I didn't want aliens, I wanted someone I could _talk_ to. And it wasn't a problem I could solve by launching another universe. I would still have been alone there, too. I wanted - _out._ Out of this place. Out of the trap."

"But there wasn't anything in the cellular automaton rules that said you could leave," said the Doctor. "There wasn't a rule of your physics that said you could leave and go somewhere else with people."

"So I..." Maria said. She looked around at all of them. God waiting for condemnation. "It was half Durham's sort of logic, the hope that what happened with the Autoverse would happen again. Half my own logic, trying to make the right sort of simulator interested in me, maybe. Or maybe I was just going crazy. I feel - a little better now - but I'm not sure I was thinking clearly before..."

Maria took a breath. "So I raised a rock and dropped it on myself. A rock that would crash through universes, break out of simulations. I raised it very high, and let it drop very far, hoping that when it got here it would have enough momentum to just - keep going. I mean - if someone had broken through a hundred layers already, they wouldn't expect to stop _here -_ and that would be a _reasonable_ prediction, so it ought to come true - and if they could take me _with_ them - does that make sense?"

_Bluh - gluh - kluh -_

"And therefore you created us," Jake Stonebender said, in a tone that didn't seem particularly excited.

From the rest of the mob there were various mutterings along the lines of "Oh, so that's it" or "That's number eight." No one seemed particularly offended or inclined to worship.

"I tried _not_ to create anyone," Maria said. "I didn't _want_ to be God. I didn't want to - be _responsible,_ you see?"

"Been there," said a number of the travelers.

"As far as I could tell," Maria said, "I had unlimited computing power. So I simulated all possible universes whose physical laws could be specified by a program of a trillion bits or less, with clock time distributed in exponential order of simplicity and the most complex universes getting ten to the trillionth power ticks -"

Ravna's mind blew.

"- and I figured so many others already had to be doing that, simulating all possible universes in order I mean - and that my own measure was small enough at this point, so, so," God stopped and gasped for breath, "so that it wouldn't make a significant difference to anyone's average flow of subjective experience if I did it one more time -"

"You had a copy of my _entire home universe?_" said Miles.

"Incorrect, Lord Vorkosigan," said Spock. "Your home universe was continuous, quantum, and spatially infinite. The stated method only had sufficient resources to simulate a discrete approximation of your universe in a bounded region, in which the total number of quantum branches was limited and the branches were continuously pruned according to some pseudo-random algorithm."

Maria paused, blinking, and then continued. "I used some of the tools the Elysians left behind, even though I didn't really understand them, to write a program that would search through all possible computations. For travelers. People who'd broken out of simulations into the underlying base level, or who'd jumped from one program to another, starting out in one place and continuing somewhere else. Lots of times. In _company,_ who'd taken others with them, gathered more of their own kind. Beings I could get along with, with human emotions and human shapes. I even looked for people who all spoke English - it sounded crazy, but English didn't have a trillion degrees of freedom, so I figured it wouldn't be a significant constraint on the search space. I _thought_ I wrote the program to look for travelers who started out from places whose cultural history was similar to Earth, but, um..." Maria looked at Spock. "I think I... sort of recognize some of you, actually... see, the Elysian tool I used to compare your origin and culture against the giant database of Earth culture that Durham brought along, um, in retrospect I didn't really configure the tool to compare your _fictions_ to Earth _fictions_ and your _history_ to Earth _history_, it was just doing an untyped comparison against the whole database... Anyway, you're what the program found, and it brought you here. Copied you here, I mean."

"But the _magic?_" Ravna said, almost involuntarily. "Why does their _magic_ work?"

"The code libraries from Elysium had all sorts of modules for letting people take their own environments with them and making the rules interact - they spent a lot of time trying to entertain themselves - so I picked one of the standard tools that had a really simple interface, where I just needed to answer a few yes-or-no questions to make it happen automatically -"

"A wizard did it!" shouted a buxom woman in black leather armor with a silver hoop strapped to her thighs. There was widespread laughter, and not a few groans of agony.

"And _what did you do to Pham?_"

Maria's face crumpled, and at least six people elbowed Ravna in the ribs or kicked her in the shins. "I'm really, really sorry about what happened to - Pham, you said his name was? There's an Elysian tool that quarantines software that it defines as scary-looking - I set it to run over your group before you materialized, but I didn't think it was going to quarantine a _person,_ let alone _part_ of a person. I'm so, so sorry - If I'd been thinking straight I would've written the program to reject any group with scary code, not tried to quarantine it - not that I'm saying I don't like you or didn't want you here or anything, I just mean - um... And then I should have paused time and tried to fix things, but I wasn't thinking fast enough... and _you_ were already doing something -"

"It was for the best," Pham said quietly.

"I'm sorry," repeated Maria. "I'm, I'm really bad in emergencies now, too slow, I'm too used to having an undo button on everything... but that's how you got here..." Maria trailed off.

There was silence.

Then, the man in the bloodstained sweater said, in a tone that was formal and yet still cheerful, "Thank you for sharing your story with us!" and the applause started.

Maria waited until the applause died down, and then bowed her head to the travelers. "Take me with you," she said. Her voice was choked and quiet. "_Please._"

"_Done,_" said the travelers, almost with one voice.

And there was more applause.

"It was a brilliant idea," said Harold Shea, "and _we'll_ have you out of here in a jiffy, rest assured."

"You _really_ think so?" said Maria, her voice cracking.

"I'm quite certain, actually," said Shea. "Why, this one doesn't even look _difficult_ - it's not a deliberate trap like bloody Ravenloft."

"But -" Maria said. A tear started from her eye again. "I, I know what I said before, but it's all just crazy talk, isn't it? There probably _isn't_ any flaw in the code running the simulation of this universe that we could use to get out -"

Shea shook his head. "I suppose we _could_ try and crack through to a lower level underneath this one, but the easy method would be to just look over the computable universes, pick a story we like, do a self-insert and launch the new program. Easy as pie."

Maria's hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide.

"Oh, don't feel bad about missing it," Shea said. "Wouldn't have occurred to _me_ when I was a greenhorn, either. Most people never manage to get out of their home universes at _all_, you know; I wasn't joking when I said you were brilliant for thinking to call for help like that. _And_ you stayed true to your ethics, which speaks well for the character of anyone who acquires infinite power. You should've seen some of the _other_ omnipotent lords of all creation we've run into - like Jehovah -"

(This produced mutterings along the lines of "that poor Job fellow", "fucking sadistic lunatic", "glad He's dead now" and "good thing we had Squirrel Girl".)

Maria still seemed to be in shock, and Shea was still continuing. "You've really got a convenient vantage point here, you know. Lots of universes are easy to get into or out of, if you're in that sort of multiverse, but being able to look them _all_ over and watch the travelers, _that's_ pretty rare. Even most Gods can't do that sort of thing. Hadn't occurred to me until now that the relation would hold among all reductionist universes with unlimited computing power - that any member would be theologically greater than or equal to the whole set. The pure science universes are usually a lot harder to move through." Shea looked sad, for a moment. "Had a couple of companions who got trapped that way, back when we were all a lot less experienced. Stuck in physics, the poor bastards. I didn't learn about the quantum suicide trick until much later. Though, come to think, that was a classical universe anyway - to break out of one of _those_ crapholes you've got to be _really_ clever -"

The Doctor waved Shea to silence. "Miss, did you keep the computation you used to find us? Could you run it again and get exactly the same result?"

"Ah... I think so," Maria said. "Even if I managed to miss a randseed or something like that, I've got a copy of the initial state of this universe, so I could just rerun my whole universe up until an hour ago and grab an exact frame of the past -"

Ravna's mind hiccuped again.

"- but I did save the original program, and I don't think it'd be difficult to run it again. Why?"

There were gasps of realization from some of travelers.

The Doctor nodded to them, graciously acknowledging that they had just demonstrated intelligence only slightly inferior to his own, and then turned back to Maria. "Could you run the program again and copy out a few things from our history, maybe? I suppose our degree of reality is small enough now that we can't really _change_ anything that went a different way before, just by simulating it differently. Even if a - program halted - it would probably _mostly_ continue somewhere else than here..." The Doctor paused then, blinking. "Oh, dear. Goodness knows where the souls in this multiverse mostly end up, or what happens to people if they die in a way that degrades and simplifies their cognitive computation before they stop, like Alzheimer's disease. Hell of a scary afterlife you got in this multiverse, Missy..." The Doctor shook his head, looking sad. "And we couldn't really _rescue_ any souls - couldn't significantly change the probability distribution of what happened to them afterward. Our own measure is too small. But there's someone in my history who I miss and wouldn't mind meeting again, just for my own sake, and I don't think she'd mind if a tiny portion of her measure joined me here."

There was a general hmm-ing sound from the group. Some of the mated couples in the group were exchanging odd looks, one partner looking suspiciously at another partner who had a reminiscent look on their face.

The man in the bloodstained sweater beamed a friendly smile at Maria. "You're one of us now and no mistake, Miss, but would you mind terribly if we stayed a bit in your home neighborhood here before moving on?"

"We _won't_ stay here forever," Jake Stonebender added. "Trust us on that! Any homebodies got left behind a long time ago. But you haven't heard our own stories yet, or gotten to know _us,_ and we should bond more closely before we move on - there's no guessing where we'll end up after a while. We can leave right away if you want... but it shouldn't be so awful here if you've got someone to talk to, I hope? And it _is_ nice when one of our own ends up as God for a while - lets us catch up on a few things." Jake paused. "Would it be any trouble for you to create a few houses for us? It's getting on toward bedtime in our sleep cycle. Or we can create our own so long as the magic holds out."

"N-no," Maria said. "I could do that."

"I hesitate to raise the subject," said Jake, "since you seem like a very polite God with a decent upbringing, but can I ask you to guarantee our privacy?"

Maria blushed slightly. "Of c-course."

There was a general cheer a moment later, when the cityscape abruptly shifted to a forest clearing studded with log cabins, with a flaming red sky above of sun almost done setting.

(Ravna staggered and almost fell over, dizzied by the apportation; _she_ still wasn't used to this.)

Neo raised his hands to the sky and called in a great voice, "_Let there be alcohol!_" A moment later, bottles began to rain down from the sky (carefully missing the people) and there was another cry of appreciation.

"_Ast kiranann kair soth-arn suh kali jalaran!_" came a voice of hissing sibilants, and a bolt of fire flew through the air and burst on a tree stump, which began burning cheerfully. Flutes and guitars materialized from backpacks and summonings. A piano fell out of the sky with a crash, surviving unharmed; and the girl with the winged creatures sat down and began to play it, her brightly colored pets now breathing fire and blinking in and out of existence. A dance exhibition began between the muscular man on whose wrist gleamed a lenticular crystal that sparkled with a thousand colors, and the sensuous woman whose deep oaken irises were marred by a single crimson-red dart.

The mob of travelers was breaking up, some departing toward the log cabins for conversational privacy or other privacy, others forming knots of cheerful dialogue. Some of the gentler travelers were forming a cluster about Maria, who seemed to enjoy the conversation very much, though she kept bursting into tears. There seemed to be a good deal of flirting going on among the travelers who were single (or less monogamous).

Ravna looked around for Pham, and saw him and automatically started in his direction -

- and then pulled to an abrupt halt. Pham was arm-in-elbow with a woman whose name escaped her... no, Gillian Baskin, that was it. One of the few travelers whose original universe included something akin to the Zones of Thought in their own home.

Ravna felt a sudden, absurd stab of betrayal. Absurd, because she'd made no move to claim Pham for her own. They'd made love exactly once, and that had turned out to be a whim of Old One's that she still didn't understand. It was even possible that Pham had been with Gillian since before they'd come _here_ - she hadn't been paying close attention at the time - but -

_But now Pham and I are the only ones from... shouldn't we..._

She raised her hand, just a little, and then dropped it.

_Probably not._

Some men, and then some women, tried to talk to her.

Ravna waved them all away.

She stared up at the sky until night fell. She didn't recognize any of the constellations. It was probably the simulated night sky of humanity's legendary origin planet, the place called Earth, a place lost so terribly far away now that it had nothing to do with distance at all. If indeed this really _was_ the night sky of the planet that had given rise to humanity in Ravna's _own_ universe. It probably wasn't, if Ravna correctly understood the process that had created / summoned her. God hadn't said anything about comparing star maps.

Sounds diminished, the people scattering for the night. She no longer bothered being polite to the people who tried to strike up a conversation - just ignored them - and in time no one tried to talk to her any more.

Ravna went on staring at the stars. She could hear nothing now but the crackling of burnt-out fires, and a few chirps that sounded like native biologicals.

She'd saved the galaxy. Pham had carried out the final action, but she had taken him to that place, she had protected him along the way. She was responsible for saving the galaxy from the Blight. She was responsible for killing uncounted trillions. She'd had the luxury of cheap protest to salve her conscience, but the truth was, if she'd had a little more time to think, she probably would have done it herself.

And she didn't need to come to terms with that. It would be meaningless to come to terms with that. Because she wasn't in that galaxy any more.

_Say it._

_You have to say it._

_You can't start your new life until you say it._

"Two," Ravna whispered, and began to weep.


End file.
